I can't write anything more about my Bach project until I acknowledge the biggest musical influence in my life, my college piano teacher, Dr. Damjana Bratuz. She is the one who introduced me to Bach -- really introduced me to his music. And to the music of everyone else. And to the piano. And to the life of a practicing musician.

We called her Dr. B and she was a fierce, powerful -- and in her way, loving -- presence in our lives, every hour of every day for four years.

We talked about her endlessly. Her hands, so small and supple, that could play the Chopin etudes as if they were sonatinas. Her scholar's mind, which even today, in her 70s, she uses to give lectures all over the place on semiotics, Luciano Berio, Liszt, Glenn Gould and her speciality, Bartok.

And we talked about our lessons with her -- our fear and dread when we didn't feel prepared, our joy when she heard our musical intentions in a piece, our wonderment at her knowledge. We truly felt we were the luckiest students to be working with her. We still do.

Bratuz was the first Italian citizen to earn a Doctorate of Musical Arts degree, and the first woman to earn that degree from Indiana University, where she studied with, and later assisted, the distinguished pianist Gyorgy Sebok.

In Bartok alone, Bratuz changed our thinking. Last month, she gave a lecture that summarized her lifelong work on the composer:

To say that Hungarian composer Bela Bartok has not been 'heard,' yet, is to acknowledge that he remains one of the most misinterpreted among the giants of the 20th century. Already in his time he was aware of the existence of a 'pseudo-Bartokian' style, since he is known to have jokingly admonished a piano student not to play his music "in such a Bartokian way."

His own piano recordings are inhabited by the vocal flexibility of the Hungarian language, transparency of sound, and a rich variety of unfamiliar timbres; above all by a circularity of movement that is in obvious contrast to the relentless vertical pounding that has become attached to the performance of his piano music, and prevents his musical world from being truly 'heard.'

One obstacle, however, is the fact that the rhythmic patterns of the peasant music that Bartok articulates in such a free, flexible, way, could never be precisely notated. Indeed, Bartok wrote in his 1943 Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs:

"The only really true notations are the sound-tracks on the record itself."

In 1993, Dr. B retired from the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, and many of her students gathered for a party. For the occasion, I wrote the following, which later appeared in the alumni magazine.

Damjana Bratuz, left, at her retirement from the University of Western Ontario in 1993.

Many of us have had teachers who changed our lives- someone whose wisdom and caring fundamentally altered the way we think, feel and look at the world. For me, and for many other music students at Western, that teacher was Damjana Bratuz.

Professor Bratuz, who retired in April from the faculty of music after 25 years, was the reason I attended Western. From the moment I auditioned for her on a wintry March morning, she became the centre of my gravity. My weekly piano lesson with her wasn't just the highlight of the week: it was the week. She demanded the highest standards and introduced a new system of learning, with new vocabulary and new meanings. Actually what she did was give us a new set of ears with which to hear music. A scale wasn't just a scale any more. It was a "Mozart scale" or a "Debussy scale." A trill had infinite expressive potential: a Chopin arpeggio bloomed with its own romantic will.

I'll never forget a lesson just after Christmas of my sophomore year. I had practised through the vacation and was ready to surprise her with several new pieces. I was sure she'd be impressed. Well, if she was, she didn't show it. She began to dissect my Bach fugue, asking me to pick out its separate lines and play each one. I stumbled around and stopped. I'd learned them all in a jumble, all wrong. Then I played some Mozart. I remember my shock when she asked me to stop playing and conduct the music instead. I felt as if she'd just asked me to juggle six oranges and two watermelons. Blood rushed to my face. Sensing my rising frustration, Professor Bratuz leaned over from her position at the second piano and said, almost in triumph, "Use your anger! Anger is good. Use it!"

Like the best teachers, Professor Bratuz's greatest wish was that we become our own pilots. Our charter territory was the classical piano repertory of the past three centuries, which stretched before us as distant and unfamiliar as the far shores of Lake Ontario. From the joyful exuberance of Bach to the ear-bending angst of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Professor Bratuz introduced us to one masterpiece after another.

Professor Bratuz, who was born where the countries of Austria, Italy and Slovenia converge, has never lost her passion for multiculturalism. That's what attracted her to Canada in the first place. Three decades in North America have not diluted her European manner or her colorful accent. Her voice is as musical as Mozart in any of four languages. And she remains a restless, pioneering intellect. In 1958, she won a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the United States and became the first woman and Italian citizen to earn a doctorate degree in music from the University of Indiana in Bloomington. Her life came full circle, she says, when she returned to Italy in 1989, this time as a Canadian citizen and senior professor, to continue her lifelong study in the aesthetics of music at the University of Bologne. Her plans after leaving Western include performing and giving lecture/recitals throughout North America and abroad.

Professor Bratuz believed that her students should not just dabble but wade into the some stream of culture that surrounded and created the great works of classical music. Many of us, fresh from rural Ontario, had never seen an opera or heard a live orchestra when we entered Western. To remedy our deficiencies, Professor Bratuz would bring books on art, philosophy and psychology to lessons. Symbols and the roots of creativity have always fascinated her, Often she would take a carload of students to Toronto in her enormous blue Buick to hear the great artists of the day: Artur Rubinstein, Maurizio Pollini, Rodu Lupu, Alfred Brendel. We would leave London in the morning and spend a couple of hours in the bookstores along Bloor Street. Then we would have supper upstairs at the Cafe de la Paix, where Professor Bratuz would order things in French for us to try. After the concert she would take us backstage to meet the artists.

Slowly, over our four years with Professor B., we began to change. Less satisfied, more curious, more disciplined, we started to shed like old clothes our laziness and ignorance and set out on the road to becoming rnusicians-a road that has no end. She got us to see ourselves as heirs to an enormously rich heritage and to feel the burden of that responsibility. Professor Bratuz's foreign world of pianistic colors and physical gestures was becoming familiar. Although I do not perform today, I use her teachings in my work as a music critic for a newspaper in Portland, Oregon. I try to listen with her ears because she hears better than anyone I know.

Her wish that we be our own pilots has come true for many of her students. Some of us ventured to Europe on our own, to study and soak up the culture. Several former students have grown into respected performers and recording artists. Some are teachers, passing on her principles which she came by through years of thought and practice. Others, like myself, earn our living on the periphery of music, but remain musicians at heart.

As Heather Morrison MusB'75, a former student, said not too long ago: "She made me realize that it isn't possible to separate music from the process of life."

Professor Bratuz didn't teach to our limitations but to our imaginations. She guided us with her eyes firmly on that far shore. If we didn't grasp a concept, she would say, "In 20 years you'll understand."

For me, its been 20 years and I'm just beginning to.

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